Macintosh Launches: Computing Revolution with a Mouse
Apple spent .5 million on a single television commercial directed by Ridley Scott and aired it during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. The ad showed a woman hurling a hammer through a screen displaying Big Brother, a clear shot at IBM's dominance of the computer industry. Two days later, Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh to a rapturous audience. The machine cost $2,495 and featured a nine-inch black-and-white screen, 128KB of RAM, and a revolutionary graphical user interface operated by a mouse. Most personal computers at the time required users to type commands into a text prompt. The Mac let people point and click on icons, drag files into folders, and see formatted text on screen before printing it. Xerox PARC had invented the graphical interface years earlier but failed to commercialize it. Apple took the concept and made it accessible to millions, permanently changing how humans interact with computers.
January 22, 1984
42 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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